We will be having a colloquium this coming Wednesday at 5 pm in Fine 214. The speaker will be Prof. Gang Tian who specializes in geometric analysis. Check out his profile/wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Tian

The title of the talk will be “Conic spherical metrics”. Here is the abstract:

I will discuss the problem of constructing spherical structures on 2-sphere with prescribed conic angles and its connection to geometric stability. In the end, I will briefly discuss higher dimensional analogue of this problem.

The next colloquium will be this coming Monday, 4/28, given by Prof. Yakov Sinai. It will be at 5pm in Fine 322. He will be talking about deterministic chaos and here is the abstract:

Deterministic chaos is a property of deterministic dynamics. I shall explain main properties of chaotic dynamics and give some example of chaotic dynamical systems.

Prof. Sinai is known for his work in dynamic systems. As many of you may have heard, he received the Abel Prize, which is often described as the mathematician’s Nobel Prize, not long ago. Check out his wikipedia page if you are interested!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Sinai

Who: Prof. Schapire, who is a professor in the department of Computer Science and specializes in theoretical and applied machine learning.

What:

Title: How to Play Repeated Games
Abstract:This talk will describe a simple, general algorithm for learning to play any matrix game against an unknown adversary. The algorithm can be shown never to perform much worse than the best fixed strategy, even if selected in hindsight. Moreover, because of the algorithm's moderate resource requirements, it can be used even when working with extremely large game matrices. Taken together, these properties make the algorithm a good fit for a range of machine-learning applications, some of which will be discussed, for instance, to the problem of learning to imitate the behavior of an "expert" while attempting simultaneously to improve on the expert's performance.

What:
Title: Knot Concordance
Abstract: Concordance is the study of which knots in three-dimensional space can be realized as the boundaries of embedded disks in four dimensions, a question that was first introduced by Princeton’s Ralph Fox and John Milnor in the 1950s. This question is closely tied to many of the strange features of four-dimensional topology and is the subject of much current research. I’ll provide an overview of this subject and an introduction to some of the modern tools that have led to breakthroughs in our understanding.

Abstract. I will explain some cool theorems in number theory that undergraduates
have proven in the last few years. This will include work on the distribution of
primes, number fields, and extensions if works by Euler-Jacobi-Nekrasov-Okounkov-Serre. Let me explain.